Concern Trolling: A Sketch

 

What might help Republicans’ prospects? Backing individual rights over intrusive government.

(There's a connection with a previous installment)

It's looking more and more doubtful whether Republicans can pull off the traditional anti-incumbent wave in the midterm congressional elections. The FiveThirtyEight website now gives them only a 44% chance of taking the Senate, largely, they say, because of the preposterous candidates they are fielding in states they can't take for granted, including Georgia, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and as of last night Arizona, where they chose yet another Peter Thiel acolyte in the anti-Semitic election denier Blake Masters; Missouri GOP voters seem to have restrained themselves and gone for the lesser of the two Erics, but former moderate Eric Schmitt has promised to "take a blowtorch to the Biden agenda" and is doing his best to seem as wild as Vance or Öz (that's the correct spelling of the name, per Wikipedia, "Mehmet Cengiz Öz, known professionally as Dr. Oz").

The House, where the craziest candidates seem to be defending safe Republican seats, looks much better for them, but even there the outlook is darkening, as the generic poll is starting to show.

Learning From Republicans: The Personal Call-Out

 

.@GavinNewsom says Dems are up against the "ruthlessness of the Republican party...all of the rights we've been afforded since the 1960's are being rolled back in real time."

He says the Democratic Party itself needs to "set the agenda...put the other party on the defensive." pic.twitter.com/NhNUuZOT03

— Elex Michaelson (@Elex_Michaelson) July 16, 2022

"Democrats need the Democratic Party, not the president, not a Speaker, not an elected officeholder, the party infrastructure, I think, has to organize with more ferocity of focus, more determination to set the agenda, set the course, and put the other party on the defense." 

What I had in mind was more like this, really. In the first place, in my response to what seems to me like whining about the absence of leaders, that we need to be the leaders ourselves. You know what the "party infrastructure" is? Infrastructure is people, my friends, organizers, activists, and shouty people online like you and me.

And in what I say about some unified partisanship: everybody needs to criticize a Democrat now and then but we need to be more careful about how we do it:

Dirty Fighting

 

The Discourse is full of this kind of thing, complaining about how Democrats aren't sufficiently like Republicans without offering any examples of what "fighting dirty" would be like. Should we be spreading Big Lies and paranoid fantasies?

Or lots of horrible little ones? Should we be ruining ordinary people's lives the way Republicans did to election workers, Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, or to January 6 rioter Ray Epps, and even a 10-year-old girl who needed an abortion? (The latter two covered in a post last night from Steve that's absolutely combative enough, but not in any way I can see dirty—the truth is all he needs.)

What's the dirtiest thing Republicans do? 

Raising campaign money by standing for policies they know are harmful, from the fossil fuel industry to the gun industry to the payday loan industry? Should we be doing some of that? Finding ourselves a bunch of rich clients intent on destroying the world and giving them a legislative hand?

I don't think so. I do think we could use some of the partisanship with which Republicans from one interest group loyally stand behind all the ideas of all their interest groups no matter how terrible and indeed unpopular they are. 

We could just leave out the dirty part by not having any dirty policies, but we all need to get on the same page; "centrists" need to learn that the thing Republicans demonize under the name "critical race theory" actually isn't a bad thing (it's really antiracist education) and start saying so in public, and "progressives" need to understand that property taxes in New Jersey really are too high and opiate addiction among white people really is a problem. 

We should start with the assumption that if a substantial contingent of Democrats believes in something, they're likely to have a point. If Tim Ryan could figure out how many working class white people need help paying back student loans—

An estimated 38.6% of the 43 million student debtors in the United States — roughly 16.6 million people — have debt but no degree six years after first entering college, according to National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) data analyzed by the Hope Center’s Mark Huelsman. (Teen Vogue, for heaven's sake)

—and start talking about it, it would do some good. If Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez found out that most of her constituents want to see more police officers on the street rather than fewer (just police officers who don't kill unarmed neighbors, please), she could talk about that too. 

Unlike Donald Trump talking about abortion, we could be telling the truth, but it would still be fighting. That one useful thing Republicans know is that they're in an army, and armies need unit cohesion.

Democrats Get in the Gutter But Not Like THAT Kind of Gutter

Who says we're hopelessly divided into camps that are unable to communicate with each other? Here's David F. Brooks of The New York Times ("Why on Earth Is Pelosi Supporting the Trumpists?") agreeing with Jeet Heer of The Nation ("Why Centrist Democrats Love Promoting Right-Wing Extremists") that the Democratic establishment ought to stop buying attack ads against "moderate" Republican primary candidates in what seems to be the hope of helping the wacky candidates become the ones Democrats will face in November.

Which seems to be what some of them have been doing:

In Illinois alone [writes Brooks], the Democratic Governors Association and Democratic Gov. J.B. Pritzker spent at least $30 million to attack a Trumpist’s moderate gubernatorial opponent. In Pennsylvania, a Democratic campaign spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on ads intended to help a Trumpist candidate win the G.O.P. gubernatorial primary. A political action committee affiliated with Nancy Pelosi worked to boost far-right Republican House candidates in California and Colorado.

Pritzker actually spent $32 million of his own money attacking Mayor Richard Irvin of Aurora, and the DGA another $18.4 million, which is certainly an awful lot—Irvin himself had a war chest of $50 million, from the Citadel hedge fund manager Kenneth Griffin, who's been mostly concerned with stopping Pritzker from replacing Illinois's flat income tax with a graduated one. Irvin, an African American veteran and former prosecutor who voted as a Democrat in the 2016 and 2020 primaries (Illinois has open primaries) and hedged publicly on his feelings about Trump, but not in text messages unearthed by WTTW-TV: